Nick Digilio welcomes J.F. Sargent, columnist and editorial team member of cracked.com, to discuss their new book The De-Textbook and some of his recent articles. For more information about Josh, visit his personal site and twitter

This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. A man had hit her hard enough to show he was trying to kill her, before. He’d been angry about having a woman in charge. This was back when Fee worked with guns, not tools. He’d talked to the other men and conspired to get the two of them alone. He was twice as big as she was. He broke her nose, so she shattered both his kneecaps with the butt of his own rifle.

What is my book even about? You’ll never know if you don’t go read it! Okay fine it’s about space mechanics. Chapter 7 was fun! Go fucking read it!

My friend went home for the Holidays and asked me to keep an eye on his apartment and car. For anyone else, this would’ve been a small, barely relevant blip on their responsibility-radar, but for me it was so much more. It was the task that would destroy me. It was… the final duty.

It started off innocuously enough when I somehow broke the key to his apartment. I don’t know how. It was an electronic key and somehow the simple act of being near me drained it of its magic electronic juices, and when I swiped it on his door, the little green light blinked nothing at me. I had to go talk to The Front Desk, and when they asked me totally reasonable questions (“If the key doesn’t work, how did you even get into the building?” “I snuck in because complex acts of burglary are for some reason less intimidating to me than basic human interactions.”), I tended to overcomplicate the matter. But, somehow, I got in, and I got his car keys.

I broke those too. They were also electronic. I dunno how. Since there was no analog key, the breaking of those keys basically bricked my friend’s BMW until he called Roadside assistance to break into his own car while I watched. Then I opened the door and found that I had somehow also broken his cupholder — on the passenger side. I have no idea, but I know it worked a couple days ago, and the only person I’d driven around was my brother (I had to take him to the airport) and I hadn’t seen him use it.

At this point, I was done. “You’re not allowed to use Austin’s shit anymore, Sarge, because you’re an idiot,” I told myself. I drove his car back to his apartment and very, very carefully slid it into the roughly 6-inch-wide assigned parking spot. Then I rode the elevator up to his apartment to drop off his car keys, ending my quest forever — only to find that I had melted his computer monitor.

Allow me to explain. Where I grew up, you left a light on when you left your home, because burglars are frightened of light. Sometimes you leave a radio on too, though if you do that you have to make sure it’s tuned to something other than the Diane Rehm show, otherwise burglars will say “let’s go anyway — this woman sounds like she could die at literally any moment.” Where my friend grew up, they appear to have a different philosophy: build death rays, and put them on your desk, disguised as lamps.

You’re trying to get an opinion on what might be the only game you buy for the next couple of months, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that critic scores and user scores just don’t sync up. Call of Duty: Ghosts currently has a score of 74 on Metacritic — not a fantastic score for a AAA game with that kind of budget, but check out the average user score: 2.3. (Metacritic uses a 100 scale for critic reviews but a 10 scale for users.) …Read the reviews — the critics’ write-ups boil down to “It’s a recycled version of the old games, but still good,” while the users’ consensus is “$60 is a lot to pay for recycled material, guys.”

You Will Forget Why You Believe Things That Were Really Important To You

…then college ended, and I got a real job, and suddenly my responsibility wasn’t to go to a room and half-listen to an incredibly smart person who was being paid to tolerate me explain some of the most complicated and nuanced ideas ever developed in human history. In fact, my responsibilities didn’t involve bettering myself at all. They involved doing things for “other people,” a group whose existence I had, until then, been only dimly aware of. I learned that if I wanted to learn, grow, and better myself, I’d have to do it on my own time.

So I stopped bettering myself, because I had fucking video games to play, and that’s where the Pokemon comparison stops working: In Pokemon, when you’re not using your Squirtlezard, you can put him in a ball in your bag and forget about him until you need him again. If you whip him back out days, weeks, or even years later, he’ll be in tip-top shape and ready to fight again. Opinions aren’t like that. If you neglect them, they start to die.